Brief October 20, 2025
A major global outage is affecting popular apps and websites, NFL security and more.
Early Monday morning, several popular websites and apps were taken offline after Amazon's computing services unit Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a major global outage.
According to DownDetector, a website that tracks online problems and outages, websites and apps including Amazon, Snapchat and Facebook were hit, while Delta Air Lines and United Airlines also faced outages with US carriers complaining they were unable to check in for flights, while others noted their reservations and seat allocations were no longer visible online.
The failure of AWS has had an impact on the international sector as well. In the United Kingdom, customers of banks including Lloyds, Bank of Scotland and Halifax reported problems when trying to log into their accounts.
According to statement from AWS, by 6:01 p.m. ET, “all AWS services were back to normal,” although some services were experiencing “message lag” that took several additional hours to process.
Here's what you need to know about the global blackout and what it affected:
What led to the global online breakthrough?
Many of the apps and websites affected by the outages use AWS, tech giant Amazon's cloud-based internet service. AWS first reported “increased error rates and latency” across a number of its services early Monday morning.
At 4:26 a.m. ET, Amazon reported the development of a widespread issue, saying, “We can confirm a significant error rate for queries made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 region.”
At 11:43 a.m., AWS provided an update on the root cause of the outage, calling it “the primary internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers.” Amazon said it is “actively working on mitigation efforts” to address the far-reaching problem.
According to DownDetector, most initial reports Internet users in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles reported power outages in the United States. Almost half all global reports came from the East Coast.
What popular websites and apps have been affected?
Gaming apps and websites were among those experiencing significant outages. Fornite, Roblox, and Clash of Clans have seen an uptick in reports of connection issues. users cannot login to your accounts.
Social media apps including Snapchat, Facebook and Reddit have seen a surge in reports of connection issues. At its peak, Snapchat messages reached more than 7000 worldwide.
According to DownDetector, outages occurred at Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, as well as telecommunications provider AT&T.
Reports about Microsoft365, Duolingo, dating app Hinge, and the Ring doorbell have skyrocketed. Video calling platform Zoom has also experienced technical problems, highlighting the extent of the outage.
In the UK, bank customers reported problems logging into their accounts, with some receiving error notifications when trying to access specified pages on banking websites and apps.
UK Government Revenue and Customs, HMRCalso encountered problems on the official UK government services website, Gov.ukwas affected.
“We are aware of an incident affecting Amazon Web Services and several online services that rely on their infrastructure,” a UK government spokesperson told TIME in an emailed statement. “Through the incident response mechanisms we have in place, we are in contact with the company who are working to restore services as quickly as possible.”
Other popular apps and websites that have been reported as having problems include: Venmo, Hulu, McDonald's, Coinbase, Signal, Wordle, Slack, Canva, Tidal, PokemonGo, Strava, and WhatsApp.
What did Amazon say about the global outage?
According to a service update, Amazon engineers identified the root cause of the problem early Monday morning and began working on a solution. “To facilitate full recovery, we have temporarily blocked some disrupted operations, such as launching EC2 instances,” the post said.
Issues at Amazon's data point in Virginia could also lead to disruptions to global access, AWS previously said. “Based on our investigation, the issue appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint on US-EAST-1,” AWS said. DNS (Domain Name System) this is the tool used to translate domain names, such as the Amazon website, into IP addresses so that a computer can read them and connect the user to the website.
DynamoDB is an API (Application Programming Interface) used by Amazon.
How long did the outage last?
After suffering from various connectivity issues for much of Monday, Amazon announced late Monday that all cloud services had been restored, ending a 15-hour outage. An earlier update stated that the root cause of the outage had been resolved, but noted that there were still some issues connecting to AWS services.
Far from being an isolated incident, the outage marks the third time in five years that a significant outage has occurred at a prominent data center in Virginia.
